Poker Math That Matters

141
has us making very dramatic swings in our decision frequencies.
We go from always calling to never calling and vice versa.
Now, here’s the concern for many players. “If I start folding or
calling 100% of the time in this situation, will my opponent start
to notice and begin changing his play?” For example, if we feel
he’s not bluffing enough, and we’re folding all the time, will he
start to notice we’re folding a lot and start launching more
bluffs? Having an opponent begin making these adjustments is
called counter-exploitation. We discover our exploitive play
opens us up to counter-exploitation. Our responsive play has
allowed our opponent to act responsively to our play as well.
There are two requirements for us to be concerned about
counter-exploitation.
1. Our opponent must observe the exploitable behavior.
2. Our opponent must properly act on his observations.
There are couple different ways to respond when we are
concerned with being counter-exploited. One response to the
fear of being counter-exploited is to simply let it happen and try
to stay one step ahead of our opponent. For example, our
opponent has been bluffing too much in spots, and we’ve been
calling with all our bluff catchers. We suddenly realize that he’s
really toned down his bluffing frequencies. Now, we can
respond to this and start folding all our bluff catchers. This
game can go on and on. It’s often called a leveling game by
poker players.
Another response is to start to pull back on our maximally
exploitive strategy. For example, we feel our opponent is
bluffing too much, and we know our maximally exploitive
strategy is to call every time with our bluff catchers. However,
we fear our opponent is good enough to detect the weakness in
that strategy and is also good enough to make a proper